The Cheese Stands Alone

Partisan politics shut down the federal government this fall, but it may be a source of reassurance that the official monitors of food safety remained ever vigilant. Consider the recent case of a French émigré named Benoît de Vitton. De Vitton grew up in Normandy, where his father insisted on strict adherence to local culinary tradition. “My dad would go crazy if we ever skipped the cheese at the end of a meal,” he said the other day, at a coffee shop near his apartment, on the Lower East Side. De Vitton moved to Strasbourg to study political science, but he nurtured an early passion for life on the other side of the Atlantic. A term as an exchange student in Montreal led to a job in New York with Isigny Sainte-Mère, a coöperative of small French dairy farms (averaging about twenty-five cows apiece), which was trying to expand its exports of cheese, cream, and butter to the United States. “We were doing great,” de Vitton said. Then, last March, he received a series of disturbing phone calls. “I am in the last step to get a huge customer, and he calls me and says, ‘Hey, we have to postpone. I hear you have a problem with the F.D.A.,’ “ de Vitton said. “Ten minutes later, I get a call from another customer. Same thing: F.D.A. detention.”

The subject of the calls was Mimolette, a legendary French cheese and de Vitton’s marquee product. During the seventeenth century, the story goes, France stopped importing Dutch cheeses like Gouda and Edam. French farmers responded by creating Mimolette, which is similar to both, colored orange by the addition of annatto seeds and shaped into a ball. Mimolette looks a lot like a cantaloupe, its orange flesh covered by a mottled, uneven rind.

The holes in Mimolette rind come from the burrowing of mites, and the insects, which resemble extra-small bedbugs, were the reason for the phone calls. Inspectors from the Food and Drug Administration had found concentrations of between five hundred and two thousand mites per square inch, well in excess of the six mites per inch permitted in cheeses by federal law. The offense, in the blunt argot of the bureaucracy, was “the presence of filth contamination.”

De Vitton, who is a bearded and bespectacled twenty-seven-year-old, said, “They are telling me that if you eat more than five hundred mites they are going to get in your stomach and you are going to die. But we are eating Mimolette for hundreds of years, and there is nothing wrong. They have absolutely not a single beginning of a proof that cheese mites can hurt you.” In Europe, the cheese mite is regarded more as an icon than as a pest. There is even a German museum devoted to the cheese mite, the Milbenkäsemuseum, in Würchwitz. (A related Web site notes, with Teutonic precision, “They are born, run on the cheese back and forth, and one day they’re dead.”)

De Vitton reached out to trade attachés at the French Embassy in Washington, who engineered a meeting between the cheese importers and F.D.A. officials. (“A lot of cheese has mites on the outside. Maybe our immune systems got used to it, eh?” Dana Purcarescu, an Embassy spokeswoman, said.) But the Feds held firm, and de Vitton was presented with an unpalatable dilemma for the five hundred balls of Mimolette—deportation or destruction. “It was just too expensive to ship it back,” he said. So this summer, under the supervision of officials from U.S. Customs, all three thousand two hundred and ninety-seven pounds of Mimolette were tossed into dumpsters and doused in bleach. “Our cheesemakers in France, they are heartbroken,” de Vitton said. “It was, like, very hard.”

Some importers, including de Vitton’s company, have started peddling versions of Mimolette that are aged less and are covered with wax rather than with the mite-riddled rind. But to purists this is a pallid substitute. “The younger Mimolette is a smoother, softer texture,” de Vitton said. “You don’t have all the nuttiness, the crustiness. No cachet.”

His colleagues in the cheese trade have left the mite fight largely to de Vitton. “You know,” he said darkly, “there are mites in Cheddar. Are they going to check all of that?” He went on, “On one side, we have a product that we love, and we are making good money. On the other hand, we are in a country where we have to follow the rules. As the French would say, we have our ass between two chairs.” ♦

Jeffrey Toobin has been a staff writer at The New Yorker since 1993 and the senior legal analyst for CNN since 2002.